The invention relates to a method for sorting unaddressed mail items.
Promotional mail represents an ever greater volume of mail which must be integrated into the daily flow of regular addressed mail. Previously this mail flow was handled in parallel to the regular addressed mail flow but this made it expensive to process at a sorting office.
In addition the senders/creators of this promotional mail wish to target their customers specifically. In particular they do not wish to send this promotional mail to every household, but only to selected households, and they want to set the time of delivery of this mail to a particular day.
This imposes new demands on the postal service for the sorting process (e.g. sorting into delivery routes): Sorting one or more batches of unaddressed mail to specific known delivery points at a specific point in time. As a rule the different batches of unaddressed mail will be delivered to different numbers of delivery points; thus for example promotional mail about items for small children is likely to be distributed to entirely different delivery points (households) from promotional mail about equestrian sports items.
Especially when this batch of promotional mail items is to be delivered to households on a specific day, the postal service is confronted with the challenge of organizing this process efficiently.